One Hobbit good, two Hobbits bad

It's funny to think that as recently as a decade ago, JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was considered unfilmable.

The 1978 Ralph Bakshi version, which told only the first half of the story, bombed at the box office, and the 1,200 page-plus tome looked as if it might never make a successful translation to film.

Peter Jackson and his box office-conquering triptych of fantasy extravaganzas changed all that, but I've always thought that The Hobbit, the first of Tolkien's novels to centre on the world of Middle Earth, was the far better candidate for a big screen transfer. It has a linear narrative and shorter character list, blissfully lacking in talking trees and bloody Tom Bombadil.

Yesterday it was confirmed that Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of a very different type of fantasy film, the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, will be taking on the challenge of directing two films based on the Lord of the Rings prequel.

Jackson will retain creative control, returning as producer after resolving his differences with New Line in picking over the vast stash of treasure accumulated from the earlier films. Sir Ian McKellen is almost certain to reprise his role as Gandalf, and Del Toro has the perfect credentials to carry this off - so we should all be as happy as a Took tucking into a second breakfast, right?

Perhaps not. I'm not sure it's going to be as easy as everyone thinks to repeat the success of Rings. Sure, The Hobbit is a far more filmable book. But the reason I'm concerned is the number. Not one film. Two films.

Where is this second movie coming from? The Hobbit is a breezy children's tale covering a quest by titular hobbit Bilgo Baggins, Gandalf, and a gang of dwarves, to kill a dragon and reclaim the homeland of the aforementioned vertically-challenged beard-toting types. There's no need to stretch it over two films.

Apparently the second film will bridge the 80-year gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The emphasis here should be on the word "gap".

Tolkien didn't exactly fill the period between his two books with a torrent of detail. There is a suggestion at the beginning of Rings that matters have been slowly getting worse as the dark lord Sauron gradually returns to his full powers, but the implication is that the beginning of the second book marks the point where the pace of his struggle for power is rapidly quickened.

Perhaps Jackson has found some morsel of "history" amongst Tolkien's various writings about Middle Earth, which have been compiled into books such as The Silmarillion, that he plans to use to form the basis of the second film. If not, this seems like a case of over-confidence.

Jackson achieved the impossible in creating a box office megalith out of a work many non-fantasy fans find impenetrable, but you still had some pretty fabulous, genre-transforming source material to work with. We all know what can happen to a franchise once it runs out of the original material which caused it to be so great in the first place. That's why Bond producers are so desperate to strap their films tight to anything vaguely approaching Ian Fleming's original work.

It would be a great pity if the final instalment in Tolkien's big screen adventure were to prove a damp squib, but perhaps I should have more faith. What do you think? Is Del Toro the right director? And what on Middle Earth is the second movie going to be about?

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